Schoolbooks ingrain Israeli-Palestinian enmity: US-funded study

(Reuters) - Israelis and Palestinians depict each other in schoolbooks as an enemy and largely deny their adversary's history and existence, according to a U.S. government-funded study published on Monday.

Young minds are inheriting a century-old struggle for land and legitimacy through their schoolbooks, said a panel of Muslim, Jewish and Christian social scientists from the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land.

Countries who give donations to the Palestinian Authority have studied Israeli allegations of incitement to violence and even anti-Semitism in Palestinian schoolbooks for over a decade, but the report said both sides bore blame for ingraining enmity.

"The schoolbooks offer narratives to motivate members of society to be part of the conflict," Daniel Bar-Tal of Israel's Tel Aviv University, one of the lead researchers, told a news conference. "In conflict societies, people not only shoot at each other, but struggle for the narrative, the image of the other and of themselves."